Exhibition Discussions | Is the Curatorial Twist of Ana Mendieta's Tate Show Anti-Feminist?

Mendieta had got married to Carl André eight months prior to her death.

And Mendieta was a very energetic, powerful, ambitious young woman.

She was 35 years old, 36 when they got married.

And Carl André was already an established artist.

He was a curmudgeon.

He was 49 years old and they drank coffee.

quite a bit together.

They had lots of fights, but so far so innocuous until she fell to her death from the 34th floor of a New York building, which was in fact Carl Andre's flat.

Carl Andre was suspected of her murder.

He was trialed and he was acquitted.

And the fact that he was considered innocent had a huge influence, not only on Ana Mendieta's reputation as a hysterical, angry Latina, you know, all the cliches, but also on the invisibility of her work.

especially at a time when female artists weren't really included in exhibitions and didn't really have the range of success.

Even when they were starting to show their work as Anna Medieta was, they never had the power that their male peers had.

And proof is that in my 20-year career, the works that I have seen continuously the most in group exhibitions, even in solo exhibitions, have been the works by Eva Hesse and Anna Darboven.

So these two artists also died prematurely, which seems to be sort of a... criteria to suddenly acquire some sort of reputation and to finally be included in the pantheon of recognized artists.

But Anna Wilkie, for example, she was 53 years old when she passed away.

Well, because she talked about the female objectification, she was often nude in her work, as Medieta was.

So she didn't really have the same recognition as someone like Eva Hesse, who was sort of a minimal sculptor artist, or Anna Darboven, who was a German conceptual artist.

So there is a difficulty for a certain kind of female work to have existed and still to this day, even much more or less so to exist and to be recognized and respected.

But there was also this difficulty for women in general, especially also in terms of market representation.

And so when you see the choice of very consciously and with determination not to mention the erasure of a female artist, you can start being a bit alarmed.

So after Anna Mendieta died, Carl André was on trial for her murder, and his friend Frank Stella paid for a very, very good, very powerful, very... expensive lawyer to defend him.

There was a gathering around Karl Andre to protect him and to protect his reputation.

He was acquitted.

The immediate consequence was that her work was tarnished.